Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Before Sunday, Portugal was one of the left’s last untoppled dominoes. Across Europe, social democratic parties have been collapsing, often losing their voters directly to populist-right insurgents.
Several parties of the traditional centre-left – France’s Socialist Party, the Netherlands’ Labour Party, Greece’s PASOK – have been obliterated altogether.
Now Portugal’s Socialist Party is going the same way, falling from 41.4 per cent of the vote two years ago to 28.6 per cent. The big winner of Sunday’s poll was not the traditional party of the centre-right, which held onto its existing share, but the radical rightist party, Chega (“Enough!”), which went from 12 to 48 seats. It marked, as André Ventura, its charismatic leader put it, “the end of two-party politics in Portugal”.
Britain is now the European outlier, albeit in a way that might surprise some Remainers. Everywhere else, the socialist parties that dominated the postwar era have crumbled – unsurprisingly, perhaps, for the causes they came into existence to defend have become obsolete.
In a world where people expect to freelance, reskill, and adapt, parties tied to trade unions and mass workforces belong, quite literally, to another century.
So why is Britain the exception? Why does Labour enjoy a 25-point lead when its Continental sister parties are being annihilated?
Before answering, it is worth stressing that, although some trends are international, each country has its own story.
The current Portuguese republic dates from a coup in 1974, which ended half a century of corporatist, nationalist dictatorship.
For years afterwards, Portuguese politics leaned left. The most right-wing party was the Democratic and Social Centre (CDS). The main centre-right party was the Social Democratic Party (PSD). Outright conservatism was beyond the pale.
But 2022 saw a realignment. The CDS, always small, was wiped out, and the Reaganite coalition it had brought together was sundered into its two component parts. Free-marketeers backed Liberal Initiative, a new libertarian party, which won eight seats on Sunday. Those who cared more about crime and immigration backed Chega – and, as in every country, the populist conservatives proved far more numerous than the libertarians.
Many commentators call Chega “far right”. But the label is not so much a descriptor as a curse, a way of putting the Mark of the Beast on someone. Yes, Chega takes a harder line on immigration and assimilation than other parties. But it is a democratic movement committed to freedom, an open society, and the rule of law.
When I was running the European Conservatives and Reformists, we were forever getting applications from new parties of the right. My rule of thumb was to look at their economic policies. If they were right-wing on immigration but left-wing on tariffs and nationalisation, it was what poker players call a tell. Such parties, when you probed, usually turned out to be pro-Putin, often anti-American and sometimes anti-Semitic.
Chega is plainly not in this category. It wants fewer bureaucrats, freer markets, and closer ties to the rest of the Lusophone world. Its programme speaks of reducing welfare dependency, and approvingly quotes Adam Smith. It is moderately Eurosceptic.
It is hard to imagine a Rassemblement National or an AfD getting off the ground among so gentle and well-mannered a people. Indeed, Chega’s chief error has been to link up with these parties at EU level, for Portugal is temperamentally Anglophile and Atlanticist.
Yet, with these qualifications, it is fair to say that Portugal has joined the wider European trend away from established socialist parties and towards newer rightist parties that oppose immigration and the speed of cultural change.
So let’s ask the question. Why is Britain bucking the trend?
Part of the answer is that it isn’t, at least not entirely. There is an insurgent rightist party here. Over the past year, the Tories have declined in the polls from the high twenties to the low twenties, not because of any swing to Labour, but because Reform has gone from almost no support to double figures.
The raw figures exclude those who refuse to pick a side. When people move from the Conservative column into the “don’t know”, “won’t vote” or “none of the above” column, Labour’s number goes up.
But the real problem for the Conservatives is, paradoxically, our voting system. Unlike in Europe, where populist-right parties get direct socialist switchers, British voters must weigh up two potential governments. When one party sinks, the other rises despite itself, so to speak.
The Tories were always going to struggle to win a fifth election – something no British party has managed since the early nineteenth century. After 14 years, every defect of the administrative state, from the Post Office scandal to PPE procurement failures, is blamed on them.
That would be bad enough, but the lockdown killed free-market thinking in Britain. On cultural issues such as immigration and crime, the electorate is well to the right of both main parties. But on economics, as I lamented here a few weeks back, voters are extraordinarily left-wing.
The traditional Tory attack against Labour – don’t let those muppets get their hands on the economy – doesn’t work when voters imagine that we ought to be spending even more.
We are likely to end up with a Starmer-led government whose majority is large, but whose support is shallow. A big majority normally betokens a measure of public support, of benefit of the doubt, of readiness to give the new guys a break.
But not, I suspect, this time. The economic facts will not care about a change in government. Britain is still going to have to start living within its means, and that is going to mean cuts. It will be Starmer who has to say no to the teaching unions, to send the nurses away empty-handed.
At that point, Britain will indeed join the European trend from the old left to the populist right. It may happen sooner than anyone imagines.
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Author: Daniel Hannan
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